Watchers in presence-enabled networks typically examine the presence state of presence entities (e.g., human users or help desks) operating within these networks in order to determine whether these presence entities are available or unavailable to receive communications. The presence state is typically transmitted to the watcher device by a presence service and, based upon this state, contact with the presence entity may be either encouraged or discouraged.
In some situations, information relating to the presence state of a particular user can be published by multiple unsynchronized sources, which sometimes leads to conflicts. For instance, a user might be associated with multiple presence-enabled devices (e.g., a personal computer and a cellular telephone) as well as network entities (e.g. PoC server, publishing PoC availability based on registration state) all publishing information on behalf of the user. One application (e.g., the cellular phone) might believe that the user is in their vehicle while the other application (e.g., the personal computer) might believe that the user is at the office.
Previous systems used fixed and standardized composition rules in an attempt to resolve presence conflicts. Composition rules are defined per presence information “type”. For example, a user's activity/location is a “person” type of element. These rules were programmed into the presence service and/or watcher, and could not be modified. In one example of a fixed composition rule, the latest presence information published was the information that was deemed the most reliable and was the information used to determine the presence state.
Unfortunately, these previous approaches often produced erroneous results. For instance, a user might drive to work in the vehicle early in the morning and bring their cellular phone. The cellular phone with the user would publish presence information to a presence service indicating that the user was in their vehicle and on their way to work. At a later time, an application (e.g., a desktop calendar) running on a personal computer at the office would assume the user was at the office and automatically publish this information to the presence service. However, the user might be late for work and still in their vehicle when the application at the personal computer published its information. Since one set of presence information indicated that the user was at the office while the other information indicated that the user was in their vehicle, a conflict existed. Using the “latest publication” composition rule to resolve the conflict produced the result that the user was at the office, since this information was the latest received. Unfortunately, this result was incorrect because the user was actually late for work and still in their vehicle. Thus, in this example, communications destined for the user were erroneously directed to the office of the user and contact with the user could not be established.
As a consequence of the above-mentioned problems, user frustration with the system increased as communications were incorrectly routed and/or prohibited. Since in many situations the problems occurred in a work environment, worker productivity was also adversely affected.
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